


Resistance

by ToxicPineapple



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: (Ish) - Freeform, But please don't take it like that, Canon-Compliant, Character Study, Companion piece to "Retrieval" in a way?, F/M, Intended to be romantic but it ended up being more platonic, Late Night Conversations, Pre-Canon, Pre-Killing Game, So go with your gut on this one I guess, Storms, Takes place when everyone in the THH class is hiding in the school, Talking in the middle of the storm, They're not actually in the middle of the storm though, Waxing Philosophical With Your Bros, and there's a storm, introspective, outside of the school, pregame, they're in the school
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:41:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22030450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToxicPineapple/pseuds/ToxicPineapple
Summary: She meets his eyes again after a moment, though, and nods her head, black hair shifting in front of her eyes. He’s always found it strange, that someone with such a pale, freckled face would have dark hair. Almost everyone he’s met in the past with freckles and fair skin has had fair hair as well. Not that the combination of features is unattractive; quite the contrary, as Mukuro couldn’t be unattractive to him if she was consciously trying, but… it’s still something to think about. Food for thought, so to speak. He wants to break the silence, urge her to elaborate, but he holds his tongue, because Mukuro isn’t the kind of person who needs to be pushed to share things. Not with him.“Yeah. I have. It says on record that I haven’t, and it’s true that I don’t have any scars, but I’ve still been injured.” Mukuro’s eyes are half lidded, thick black eyelashes tangling when she blinks, and Makoto considers reevaluating whether or not she’s really wide awake, or if she’s just very good at hiding her exhaustion. “When I was seven, I fell and broke my ankle.”---Makoto and Mukuro talk about what it means to resist.
Relationships: Ikusaba Mukuro & Naegi Makoto, Ikusaba Mukuro/Naegi Makoto
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	Resistance

“I’ve gotten injured before, did you know that?”

The admission is soft, and so light that it might have floated away on the wind, if they were outside. They aren’t though, they’re inside, both of them are, curled up next to each other in the laundry room while wind howls outside, so loud that they can hear it even through the metal plates over the windows.

If Makoto wanted to, and he doesn’t, particularly, he could reach up and knock on the plate he’s sitting underneath. He knows what would happened, has memorised by now exactly how long the vibrations linger after he pulls away his fist depending on how hard he pounds. There are red marks still on all of his knuckles from the breakdown he had yesterday, the one that he wishes Mukuro hadn’t seen, but here they are anyway, and she’s looking at him like he’s the only person left in the world.

“You have?” He asks, even though it’s probably unnecessary. Mukuro isn’t the kind of person to say something and then just leave it hanging in the air. She’s a person of few words, that much is true, but when she does speak she makes sure that it’s coherent. There are a lot of things about her that don’t make a lot of sense, but the things she’s said, they aren’t one of them. Still, Makoto doesn’t have to fake interest as he gazes over at her.

It’s far too late for them to be awake, and there’s no reason for them to be, except that Makoto is a light sleeper and can’t stay unconscious through the storm and Mukuro spends all of her nights in here anyway, and not in her room, for reasons that Makoto doesn’t feel close enough to her to ask. The expression she’s wearing is quiet but far from exhausted. Her pale grey eyes are alert, fixed on a spot on the wall perhaps inches from Makoto’s face. She drums neatly trimmed fingernails against her knee, uniform and rhythmic, one after the other, and Makoto thinks that something about her gaze is wistful.

She meets his eyes again after a moment, though, and nods her head, black hair shifting in front of her eyes. He’s always found it strange, that someone with such a pale, freckled face would have dark hair. Almost everyone he’s met in the past with freckles and fair skin has had fair hair as well. Not that the combination of features is unattractive; quite the contrary, as Mukuro couldn’t be unattractive to him if she was consciously trying, but… it’s still something to think about. Food for thought, so to speak. He wants to break the silence, urge her to elaborate, but he holds his tongue, because Mukuro isn’t the kind of person who needs to be pushed to share things. Not with him.

“Yeah. I have. It says on record that I haven’t, and it’s true that I don’t have any scars, but I’ve still been injured.” Mukuro’s eyes are half lidded, thick black eyelashes tangling when she blinks, and Makoto considers reevaluating whether or not she’s really wide awake, or if she’s just very good at hiding her exhaustion. “When I was seven, I fell and broke my ankle.”

“A fracture is a really big thing to just hide away, isn’t it?” Makoto asks, his eyes widening, and Mukuro cracks a wry smile. When she looks at him like that he feels embarrassed, like he’s overreacting, even though he was barely raising his voice, and then Mukuro chuckles, a quiet but rewarding sound, and realises that her gaze is endeared, not judgemental or incredulous. She glances off to the side again, hand falling still atop her knee, and nods.

“It is.” She agrees plainly. “I didn’t choose to hide it, y’know. I mean, as impressive as it sounds to be the Ultimate Soldier who’s never gotten injured in her life, it seems like a pretty dumb thing to hide away. Especially because the ankle thing was a result of my own clumsiness. It’s just not on record because I never went to the hospital for it.”

“Huh? Why wouldn’t you?” It occurs to Makoto as the question leaves his lips that he really doesn’t know a lot about Mukuro’s childhood. He knows that before attending Hope’s Peak that she was a mercenary with the group Fenrir, but everyone in their class knows  _ that.  _ It isn’t as though Mukuro has ever hidden the tattoo on her hand, and word travels fast at their school. (Traveled. Past tense. Hope’s Peak Academy really isn’t a school anymore, not since the tragedy.) He doesn’t know anything about her parents, or about what it was like growing up with Junko, or- or anything, really. “I’m sorry if that’s a personal question,” if she hasn’t told anybody, it’s likely that there’s a reason for that. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t mind.” Mukuro smiles distantly. “I think maybe I would, at another time of day, but all of the worries and stuff seem to go away in the early morning, don’t they?”

A particularly strong gust of wind slams against the plate above Makoto’s head, and he feels inclined to agree with her statement. Everything is sluggish, like they’re moving through a thick gel substance. Still. Quiet. Nothing else exists. Nobody else exists, nobody but they too. The rest of their world leading up to this point has been a figment of their joint imaginations. Or perhaps there was none of that to begin with, and it’s always just been this, and the outside world is something that they, consciously, made up to pass the time. When the sun rises and all the lights turn back on again, and Headmaster Kirigiri plays an announcement saying that it’s time to get up, then the world will flicker back into existence, but for now… Makoto is fine with it all being fictional. Fine with reality just being him and Mukuro and no one else.

“It’s not a very exciting reason, of course. My parents were extremely wealthy and we just had a private doctor.” She shrugs, and Makoto thinks,  _ ah, that makes a bit of sense.  _ “It healed up nicely and you can’t even tell that my ankle was broken to begin with. I’m glad that it did, because if it was the kind of injury to stick around, that flared up in high-intensity situations, I imagine I’d have gotten into a bit of trouble by now, huh?” Mukuro chuckles, shaking her head, and Makoto remarks to himself how odd it is to see her smiling and laughing so frequently.

Maybe that’s due to the time of day as well. “Thanks for telling me that. About your ankle, I mean, but about your parents too.” He pulls at the strings on his hoodie, thoughtlessly tying one of them into a square knot so that he has something to do with his hands. He doesn’t feel awkward saying emotional things, but it feels different when everything is so quiet. And when he’s saying it to Mukuro, especially. It’s so easy to talk about everything else with her sometimes he almost forgets to put his optimism all the way up like he does with his other classmates. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s something to notice. “I’ve always kind of thought of you as invincible.”

The look Mukuro gives him is difficult to read, though Makoto thinks that the information is probably there, and it’s just difficult for him to process it because right now his brain is all muddled, and he’s not thinking properly. “I’m not.”

“Well, I know that,” Makoto huffs, a bit embarrassed. “Nobody is invincible. But you’ve always seemed, I dunno, impervious to everything. Like nothing could even touch you. Everyone has scars, you know? I have one, look,” he pushes himself up onto his knees and tugs up his shirt, showing her the ugly, jagged scar near his pelvis. “I had an appendectomy when I was in seventh grade.” Mukuro’s cheeks redden when he does so, and it occurs to Makoto that even though it’s nearing three in the morning, there are probably still boundaries that he should respect. He lets his shirt drop. “Sorry,” he smiles sheepishly, “but you know what I mean, right?”

After a moment, Mukuro nods. “I think so.” She hums, and tilts her head to the side, resting her cheek atop her knee. “The scar thing is more as a result of my technical abilities as a soldier. There are still people better than me. I just haven’t met them yet. Or if I have, I’ve managed to evade injury by being smarter than them. It really doesn’t mean anything, that I’ve never been injured in combat. I have an extremely low pain tolerance, imaginably.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Makoto agrees, and Mukuro flutters her eyes shut, but nods.

“And when it comes down to it, I… think there are certain things that I’m definitely not immune to, that you probably wouldn’t have any way of knowing about.” Her voice is a lot softer now, and sadder too, like the words coming out of her mouth are true, but she doesn’t want them to be. “Things that I’d like to be immune to. But I’m not.”

Makoto doesn’t know what to say to that.

“If I was, if I could shrug those things off, I think-” Mukuro breaks off. “Ah, well, I guess I just think that things would be better, for everyone, if I could.” Her tone is bitter. “But I can’t. Maybe I’m just not strong enough.”

“I don’t think there’s any correlation.” Makoto blurts, and Mukuro’s eyes open, shooting over to him. “Between strength and immunity, I mean. You’re never truly immune to things, you said that yourself, right? Maybe it’s not about being immune, maybe it’s about, uh, building up the strength to be resistant. There’s power in resistance, more power than there is in immunity, I think. Because when you’re immune, you never know what it’s like to suffer in that way. But when you can resist it, it’s like, you, you suffer so much that eventually, things just, they don’t touch you any more.”

“Huh.” Mukuro gives him a long, searching look, and then eventually looks off. Her gaze is faraway. “I’ve never thought about it that way before.”

They sit in silence after that. Makoto wants to say something else, to encourage her in another way, but he finds it impossible to break the quiet. Somehow it feels indecent, out of place, in such a low-energy setting. Besides, Mukuro’s expression is a mask of thought, and he doesn’t want to disrupt her.

He’s not sure that she knows he does it, but in the quiet moments like this, when they’re just sitting across from each other and not talking, he likes to watch her think. Mukuro is a master of impassivity. She could be thinking about anything, about anyone, and he wouldn’t know. She’s better at it, in some ways, than even Kyoko; who betrays little bits of what she’s thinking and feeling if you know how to find them. With Mukuro, it’s like her entire face just shuts down. It’s impossible to know what’s going on in her head if she doesn’t want you to.

Makoto messes with the bottom of his hoodie. When he first came to Hope’s Peak, it was still in good condition, but it’s begun to fray a little over the years. It’s a miracle it’s been able to stay together after all this time, to be honest. He knows he shouldn’t mess with the loose threads, but he can’t help it. It’s difficult to keep from pulling at them, even if he knows the consequences of doing so.

“It’s a conscious choice, then.” Mukuro mumbles, and Makoto looks back up at her. “Being able to resist things. You have to choose to not let them affect you. They won’t just roll off of your back.”

“Yeah.” Makoto agrees. “I think everything is a conscious choice, in a way. Even if you do things without meaning to, you still made choices leading up to it. Not that that means that your actions are ever irreversible, or unforgivable, but that’s what having free choice means. You have agency.” He gives Mukuro a onceover, trying to figure out what she’s talking about. “Do you feel like you’ve made a mistake lately, Ikusaba? I don’t know how good I am at advice, but if you want to talk about it, I-”

“No, that’s fine.” She cuts him off. A smile appears on her face, all of a sudden, and Makoto would think that it’s forced with how quickly it comes on if he didn’t know any better. Mukuro isn’t the kind of person to waste smiles. She only makes that kind of expression when she really feels it. It’s one of the things that makes Makoto want to spend more time with her, so that he can see those smiles more often. “There’s hardly anything to talk about. I just, need to work on resisting it.” She glares off, but when he tries to follow her gaze, he finds that he can’t tell what she’s looking at. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much. “And then after that, maybe I’ll find a way to fix it, too.”

(It isn’t until years later, sitting on the floor of the tech lab over a laptop that the password to is  _ despair,  _ that Makoto realises exactly what Mukuro was alluding to. Belatedly he wonder if perhaps half of the Ultimate Despair wasn’t very despair at all. But maybe resisting was harder than Makoto ever thought it was.)

**Author's Note:**

> if you ignore the last bit you can almost pretend that this fic has a hopeful ending lol
> 
> maybe if i was a kinder person this would be the prologue to some kind of canon-divergence fic where mukuro kills junko in her sleep and the tragedy fucking ends but unfortunately :3 i'm not
> 
> anyway i like this pairing. i honestly didn't mean for it to end up so chaste but mukuro be like that sometimes
> 
> makoto is babey


End file.
